“Environmental problems on the St. Johns came with industrialization and development and have continued, exacerbated by rapid, unplanned growth.

“Sporadic attempts in the past to clean the river worked temporarily but were overcome by growth and pollution ...

“Today, diseased fish symbolize the severe pollution of the river, and efforts are again under way to attempt to restore its quality and health.”

Those words could have been written in the summer of 2010 when a massive fish kill left hundreds of large redfish floating belly up in the St. Johns.

Or they could have applied to the condition of the river last fall and this winter when algal blooms fed by pollution turned large parts of the river a sickly green.

But the above quotation was part of a report issued a quarter of a century ago by the Florida Department of Natural Resources, which later became part of the Department of Environmental Protection.

The head of that agency today, Herschel Vinyard, is fond of saying that DEP is working diligently to “get the water right.”

Clearly, we still have a long way to go to move beyond the problems outlined in the 1989 report. That demands that more attention be paid to the adverse impacts to the river’s health that will come if the river’s channel is dredged to a depth of 47 feet as JaxPort wants.

JaxPort’s CEO, Brian Taylor, brushed off any environmental damage from the dredging during a City Council workshop on the project last week.

Taylor pointed out that the original river channel was about 8 feet deep. It’s now 40 feet as dredging projects were done as ships got bigger and needed deeper water.

What was the river like before we started digging the channel deeper and deeper? When the French explorer Jean Ribault first saw the river now known as the St. Johns in 1562, this is how he described it:

“The fairest, frutefullest and pleasantest of all the worlde, abounding in honey, venison, wildfowl, forests and woods of all sorts.”

After more than 450 years of industrialization and rapid, unplanned growth, that river is gone. How much more — from continual dredging to water withdrawals to polluted runoff — can the St. Johns absorb before we lose what we have left?

One speaker told the City Council workshop there will be no “environmental disaster” from the JaxPort project; the river has been dredged before, he said, and even the course of the river’s channel has been changed.

The tarpon fishing in Mill Cove once attracted anglers from around the country, including Ernest Hemingway and baseball great Ted Williams.

Then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the same agency that would do the proposed deep dredge, rerouted the river’s channel.

Mill Cove’s once sandy bottom was covered in silt, the clean water the tarpon need was no more and the fishery was all but destroyed.

The Corps’ efforts to repair the damage haven’t been a roaring success.

The environmental impact of dredging the St. Johns ever deeper must be a bigger part of the debate than it has been to date.

Simple shrugs and assurances from JaxPort, JAX Chamber and other proponents of the deep dredge are ignoring what’s happened in the past that changed the St. Johns from “the pleasantest in all the worlde.”

Comments posted when this article first appeared also seem to be "ignored", omitted in fact. That is happening a lot lately. Once again though Ron, If this issue was really as significant or important to you or the editors, it would be getting as many frequent and repetitive articles and opinion pieces as is the pension issue.

Good cause, important issue Ron, but we know that business, industry, and development are likely to prevail over any sense of balance between caring for our waterways and caring for profit.